Articles by: "Eddie Lee, Head of Publisher Account Management – Nativo"

How automation can help any publisher compete in digital advertising

November 29, 2021 Eddie Lee, Head of Publisher Account Management – Nativo

This is the Catch-22 era for publishers. Magazines, newspapers and other media companies must evolve their businesses into the digital space to survive. But the digital world has already disrupted their industry. Survival has been at the cost of doing more with less, including fewer editorial and operational resources. Google and Facebook dominate digital advertising. Ad revenues at traditional media like newspapers dropped 62% from 2008 to 2018. Layoffs, exacerbated by the global pandemic, continue to hammer the media industry.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for publishers: 81% of consumers say they trust content on a publishers’ sites. So in the near future, how can publishers survive and thrive given the inherent trust they have developed with consumers, and what technologies will enable that?

To figure out what publishers need, let’s start with what they are missing. Publishers lack a clear means to establishing a foothold in digital advertising that allows them to compete with the volume and efficiency of the industry giants. They lack the technology to provide reliable, data-driven paths to revenue. And increasingly, they lack the people-power to get it all done.

The power of automation

Automation will be key to turning weaknesses into strengths. Automation will also build on the advantages that publishers retain amidst all the digital change happening in their industry. Publishers still have the most premium audience, customized content against which to advertise, plus a deep understanding of their audience and its preferences. And unlike on the assembly line, automation won’t replace staff. Instead, it frees up more human time for higher-level, more creative problems.

Publishers will have to learn or acquire the knowledge to automate in a few areas if they want to stay in the game. Automaton supports:

Sales and planning support
Pricing and bidding calibration
Reporting and relationship management
Identifying opportunities for growth and new business lines

Sales and planning support

Pre-sales activities, like vetting, scheduling, and negotiation, take a lot of time. Automation along each of these chokepoints can keep the sales funnel unclogged and new leads coming in, contributing to more stability in revenue flow. Even the process of creating mocks or proof of concept-level examples can be largely automated. This frees up time in the sales journey for real relationship building and, well, sales. Streamlining that demo experience can impact both sales and dev teams and will be pivotal as publishers move to scale exponentially in the digital world.

Pricing and bidding

Automated pricing and bidding is nothing new in digital publishing and advertising. But as the demand for more customized, alternative pricing models such as engagement-based pricing arises, publishers will spend more time on manual processes to adapt these models to work alongside CPM pricing models.

Now, technology has caught up, and these calculations can be automated within the bidding process. This offers publishers the ability to charge a premium for alternative pricing models as well as frees up Ad Ops teams, enabling them to work and think more critically and carefully (rather than wasting time on tedium) and offers customers greater transparency into fee structures and profitability — a feature that is becoming more important for brands and consumers alike.

Reporting and relationship management

Whether you run QBRs or provide end-of-campaign reports, the full planning and execution cycle for these deliverables can be a seriously time-consuming process in and of itself. This is another place publishers need to focus to bring the technology of automated reporting in line with the expectation.

Anyone in advertising has probably spent time battling reporting processes or templatizing minutiae deep into the night. Nailing automation here is both a time-saver and a stress-saver. It’s also one of the best ways to continue to grow your relationship with a customer, providing them with regular insight and feedback and enabling you to work together to make campaigns work better or hit their specific goals.

Opportunities for growth and new business lines

It’s not uncommon for major companies to make decisions based on screenshots of reports imported into Powerpoint templates. Let’s face it, insightful decisions require ready access to the breadth of a publisher’s data across campaigns. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. So, some well-placed automation of these processes can be game changing.

Streamlining company-wide reporting and data-driven insights, if done right, can guide a company on where to expand next or what they should be focusing on. These are strategies that advertising giants have used for years — now this technology is available for smaller players to understand and exploit to create more dynamic decision-making.

Bottom line

The bottom line is that we’re not going to compete with the Metas and Alphabets of the world through volume. However, we stand a good chance doubling down on our core audiences and building streamlined, efficient advertising machines. These can be built to incorporate automation that provides more accurate insights, and frees up our human staff to keep bringing that personal touch to the business.

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Trust, walled gardens and a shining new opportunity for publishers

September 8, 2021 Eddie Lee, Head of Publisher Account Management – Nativo

The future of digital advertising might just revolve around the matter of trust. But before publishers take on that question, they should consider this one: Why is Big Tech working so hard to build trust in their respective walled gardens?

Take Amazon (please!). They’re rumored to be creating a universal identifier restricted to their ecosystem. Google’s proposed FLoC targeting, presented as the evolution of 3rd party cookies, might be reimagined before it even launches over privacy concerns. But surely whatever takes its place will only serve to strengthen its monopolistic hold on advertising. Apple is pushing to present their core OS’s as privacy-focused — all while maintaining their typical “advantageous” relationships with the app developers that build and support large parts of their ecosystem. All are effectively fortifying the garden walls while working to convince the public of their respective trustworthiness.

This new-found obsession should come as no surprise to publishers: Trust is a key ingredient in the secret sauce of ad revenue growth.

Anecdotally, we know this to be true, and the numbers don’t lie. Privacy is the #1 driver of influence and engagement on social media platforms. Brands and agencies are cutting advertising budgets due to trust issues: Of those who decreased ad spend on one or more major ad platforms, 35% cited concerns over ethical handling of user data.

A shining opportunity for publishers

In a new trust-based world of content and advertising, publishers start with a few crucial advantages.

First, publishers enjoy implicit goodwill from their audiences, which converts to business. More than two-thirds of consumers are more likely to engage with an ad in the context of a publisher they know and trust. Second, publishers have the advantage of knowing the types of content readers want to engage with. Most notably, publishers own the new “oil” of advertising: 1st party data.

What is the opportunity for publishers? It’s a chance to differentiate themselves from Big Tech as the embodiment of stewardship with regards to consumer data. In short, publishers must buck the status quo and adopt a strategy where the audience is no longer for sale. Sell the site and sell the content. Maybe even leverage audiences on the backend to improve content experiences or implement new rate types. But no matter what, protect audience’s trust in publishers audiences by implementing a privacy-first approach.

Capitalize with balance and control

Successfully seizing this opportunity will take balance and control.

Balance subscription and ad-supported strategy.

A paywall that is too high limits exposure and hamstrings new audience gains. However, too much advertising hurts a brand’s value and, most of all, the audience’s trust (that they won’t be constantly blasted with ads).

Control the quality of the user experience

Ad clutter diminishes trust by reneging on the promise of a good user experience. But control also means an increased cognizance of demand sources. Due to its inherent reliance on 3rd party cookies, programmatic demand should be a last resort. And these demand sources should provide the tools necessary to preserve brand-safe environments.

Trust is the answer (and the question)

How does the industry enable publishers to build and maintain trust? The simplest solution may be to step aside and let publishers create quality content. The role of industry tech platforms, in turn, is to support publishers without adding complexity. All the while, brand safety is table stakes: Any digital distributor should guarantee it (full stop).

Of course, tech platforms must enable publishers to meet their business objectives. They should support multiple pricing models and offer broad customization options for demand sources. Again, this is because publishers know best in a new world of 1st party data and heightened demand for sophisticated content. (Read: the opposite of standard display).

The guiding principle? Trust. The differentiator from Big Tech? Trust. Our final thought? Trust us on this one.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Demand path optimization: a publisher panacea

May 11, 2021 Eddie Lee, Head of Publisher Account Management – Nativo

Everyone seems to be focused on the “new” data strategies that publishers can deploy in a post-cookie world. The New York Times set the agenda with their news about phasing out third party data and introducing their own proprietary first-party audience segments. Vox Media and The Washington Post were fast followers in announcing their respective first-party data solutions.

Alas, not all publishers have an army of data scientists and technical specialists to figure this out for them. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other opportunities to capitalize on in this new era. The often overlooked strategy to consider is demand path optimization (DPO). Here are a few reasons why DPO is an optimal solution.

More ≠ More

With programmatic advertising came the promise of a democratized ecosystem. Publishers big and small would gain access to a new array of ad spend. The reality, however, was (and still is) something very different. Publishers partnered with more and more ad tech providers promising unique access to premium demand. Initially, each new partner correlated to more revenue. So, publishers found themselves hooked up to dozens of partners. But then the revenue plateaued–or in some cases decreased–because more is not always more.

Despite the continually increasing investment in digital advertising by brands and ad agencies, it is not infinite. Enter DPO. The best way for publishers to ensure they are accessing truly unique and quality demand is to connect to it directly. This doesn’t mean doing away with the systems and efficiencies that come with programmatic advertising. It starts with assessing which partners are performing the best.

Last year, education publisher Chegg cut out all ad resellers and trimmed its supply-side platform partners that delivered less than 5% revenue. The result: a third fewer ad tech partners and no impact on performance. Chegg was able to achieve the same level of performance with fewer partners because they focused on quality not quantity.

Optimize the experience to optimize results

Another benefit of DPO is an improved user experience for publishers’ audiences.

With every additional ad tech partner integrated with a publisher’s ad server comes a tax on page loads. The longer it takes a page to load, the more likely users are to leave the site. But that’s not the only side effect of increased latency: auctions can timeout, ad slots can render irregularly or even go unsold.

Unsold ad slots became especially problematic for news sites during the last 15 months. A heightened focus on brand safety by advertisers reluctant to appear next Covid-19 and civil unrest content led to a drop off in fill rates.

While standard display ad slots may have gone unsold, there was an uptick in the adoption of integrated ad formats such as sponsored content. These formats not only offer premium, brand safe environments, since the ads render as unique editorial content, but also drive revenue. In fact, we’ve seen a 45%+ lift in revenue when publishers began using integrated ad formats such as sponsored articles. Publishers deploying integrated sponsored articles also saw an increased average in audiences’ time spent on page and reduced bounce rates.

Context > Cookies

Digital cookies have been crumbling almost since their invention, and the effectiveness of that data is not as impressive as many advertisers believe.

Publishers and their content have an innate value to their audiences. When advertisers don’t take that into account it not only undervalues publisher’s content, it undervalues the loyal audiences that they’ve built. Furthermore, with each degree of separation between publishers and advertisers, this innate value may not even be realized.

At Nativo, we started putting third-party data targeting to the test as compared to contextual targeting. Consistently we’ve seen contextual targeting meet or beat engagement performance as compared to third-party data targeted campaigns. In fact, looking over sponsored content campaigns from the last 30 days, we’ve seen a more than 2X improvement of engagement performance with contextual targeting versus third-party data.

For too long, advertisers have undervalued the importance and performance of contextual targeting. But times are changing.

Innovation | Perspectives

What publishers can learn from D2C brands (who learned it from them)

March 10, 2021 Eddie Lee, Head of Publisher Account Management – Nativo

Successful D2C brands have a strategy for each and every customer touchpoint. This new crop of startups have made this specific way of marketing and selling into a model all its own. They have a renewed focus on understanding what customers want, expect, and need every step of the way. This includes everything from research to purchase and returns along with everything before, after, and in-between.

This approach borrows much from what is perhaps the oldest “direct to consumer” industry in existence: publishing. Publishing has always been the purest form of providing what the consumer wants, whether news or entertainment, in text or audio or visual form. Publishers have to be direct with consumers. Their value proposition is clear: This is what we offer, and here it is for your consumption. And today’s most successful D2Cs mirror this process in their sourcing (and marketing).

Traditional publishers recognize the power of subscription models and advertising on editorial content, but many of the new class of publishers have gone above and beyond. To name just a few: Food52 transitioned successfully from recipe blog to culinary business, leveraging their recipe site, and engaged its community to create a thriving home kitchen, cooking and specialty food business. Buzzfeed’s Tasty pivoted (or pivoted their pivot) into Pet by Tasty. They harnessed the undeniable combination of the internet and animal content. And they use it to power a natural pet food business. And of course, in 2014, Emily Weiss metamorphosed digital beauty destination Into the Gloss into the multi-billion dollar juggernaut Glossier. This new class of publishers understands — and monetizes — the power of brand equity, loyalty, and community.

Lean into your D2c roots

Even the more “traditional” publishers are well positioned to do the same. They’ve already accomplished the hard parts, like building a community, establishing trust, providing consistent value, and earning brand equity and cachet. Now more than ever, publishers are sitting on an unmined vein of pure gold. And with today’s level of technology, the next step for publishers is much more achievable than, say, sourcing a sustainable make-up factory or producing industrial quantities of pet chow.

Publishers now have the tools and expertise readily available to marry editorial with branded content thoughtfully and intentionally. They can respectfully leverage the enthusiasm and engagement of their communities and the eminence of their brands to create novel revenue streams. We can say farewell to the numbers game, where more clicks and eyeballs meant everything. It is being (rightfully) subsumed as a jaded consumer population demands quality, relevance, and a bit of respect in how they are advertised to. Publishers have already done the hard part as the original D2Cs.

Here’s a few more lessons that they can re-borrow from today’s most successful D2C companies.

Let your content lead your commerce

D2Cs quickly developed a new mastery of advertising everywhere their consumers already were, in podcasts or specific niches of social media. Even then, these brands did their best to match the theme, tone, and even appearance of their surroundings. In no way can an ad or branded content take a reader/viewer out of the experience. Your brand has worked so hard to give the consumer a consistent “universe” of experience. Don’t let bad advertising take them out of it and ruin all the established good will.

Feelings, lifestyles, brands > products, services, logos

Luggage D2C Away doesn’t sell suitcases. They give consumers the ability to live the jet setting lifestyle they’ve always wanted. Casper doesn’t sell mattresses. They imagine a world where everyone is well-rested and sleep is a pillar of personal fitness. Today, the bigger picture is the bigger seller, especially when everyone knows they can get an objectively similar product from a dozen places instantly. With everything so commoditized, consumers want to be a part of something bigger. Chances are that consumers already associate your brand with a lifestyle, feeling, or movement. Identify it and become a proactive champion.

Taking back the lead

Publishers are the “OGs” of D2C. Publishers boast the power of brand equity, loyalty, and community. So, they are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the opportunities that D2C brands have to work so hard to achieve. All publishers have to do is to continue to focus on their consumers and take back the lead in crafting, monetizing and commercializing the products their consumers want, expect, and need – a trusted brand with content.

Advertising | Perspectives

To win in the digital ad game, focus on the end (user)

October 19, 2020 Eddie Lee, Head of Publisher Account Management – Nativo

Lately, every week brings more news of sweeping changes from the media world’s tech titans to their platforms and ad policies. And none of them are more alarming than the end of the third-party cookie — if you believe the headlines.

However, this tectonic shift in how advertising operates on the open web today does not need to be a death knell for publishers and their ad supported revenue models. Publishers will win if their focus is on the end game: their users. Let’s start with a quick recap of the changes undertaken by the largest browsers and device owners.

The third-party cookie & data privacy

In January,Google declared the retirement of third-party cookies from Google Chrome by 2022. This gives the industry only two years to completely rework technology fundamental to the operation of the internet.

Not long after, Apple announced enablement of its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) by default on all browsers on iOS, not just Safari.

Advertising creative & traffic changes

In May, Google rolled out a feature designed to block ads it deems use too much network or battery power (also known as “heavy ads”).

In August, Apple announced the iOS 14 feature that automatically redirects from News+ publisher links to the Apple News app.

How publishers can win

Let’s briefly level set the real-world context behind these Google and Apple updates.

Forty percent of online US audiences currently access the internet through a third-party cookieless environment such as Safari or Firefox. What does this mean? It’s likely a significant portion of your traffic already has third-party cookies disabled.

Once Chrome joins the ranks of Safari and Firefox, another 45% of online US audiences will no longer be trackable with third-party cookies. That means 85% of US online audiences will be untrackable by third-party cookies by 2022. This could seem like the end for your ad supported revenue model. But is it really all gloom and doom?

Not even close. The elimination of third-party cookies is a good thing for publishers. That’s because your first-party data and onsite cookies just skyrocketed in value.

Step 1: Prioritize data security to protect your users. And yourself.

If onsite users consume your content (or media), they value your property and their relationship with you. Don’t let precious user data leak from your site for targeting on other sites.

Rather than spending the next 12 months on the hunt for a perfect cookieless solution, lock down your data today. Update your security terms and conditions. Determine which of your technology partners enable secure and cookieless targeting and matching – or who they are considering for this solution. Why? You can then deliver unique and proprietary first-party data for onsite targeting – for a premium. Recognize the unique value that you deliver brand advertisers by coupling your media and data. With the right configuration of content, data and unique ad formats, publishers can decrease the number of ads onsite and still increase revenue and performance.

Next let’s tackle the ad creative and traffic changes. Google and Apple aren’t blocking “heavy ads” and redirecting users to the News+ app simply for the sake of undermining publishers’ businesses or thwarting audience traffic to your site, though it may feel that way. Rather, long page load times and barriers of entry like paywalls are terrible for users. Apple and Google (and Facebook and Amazon) know their value is their user base. Publishers must prioritize the end user, too.

Step 2: Optimize the user experience. Optimize the revenue potential.

We live in a world of instant information and gratification. This point has been punctuated by the pandemic’s ongoing surge in digital content consumption. With each wasted second on page load or obstacle to information, publisher bounce rates increase exponentially.

Alternately, a decrease in latency inversely correlates to revenue, with RPMs increasing as high as 70%. To accommodate, the industry is witnessing monetization solutions shift server-side, like Prebid, or even closer to the CDN in some cases. Explore these options when investigating or assessing monetization partners. Moving server-side has added benefits for first-party cookie persistence that can also enable a higher premium for your first-party user data.

It’s easier said than done, but this technology exists today. I’ve witnessed its results firsthand. To prepare for the death of third-party cookies, double down on your most valuable asset — your users — and bullishly safeguard their experience. The result? Happy and returning users, a future-proofed business model and positive impact to your bottom line.